Preview: Mementoes of Five Jesuit Popish Plot Victims

The mementoes for the next few Mondays in our Son Rise Morning Show series on the English Martyrs selected by Father Henry Sebastian Bowden are among the most dramatic so far: five Jesuit martyrs, offered a pardon while the nooses are around their necks at Tyburn Tree; one of the Carthusian martyrs, visited by Henry VIII himself while in prison; and the great Cardinal Bishop, St. John Fisher on the day of his beheading.

We'll start on Monday, June 12 with Blessed Thomas Whitebread (or Whitbread), SJ, preparing his fellow Jesuits for great suffering on the Feast of Saint James almost a year before their execution and the dramatic scene of Fathers John Gavan, William Harcourt, Anthony Turner, John Fenwick, and Whitebread himself at Tyburn on June 20, 1679. 

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here!

On page 192 of Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors, Father Bowden describes the homily Father Whitebread gave on the Feast of St. James, July 25, 1678, as the Provincial Superior to the Jesuits in England. Father Whitebread had been a missionary to the Catholics in England since 1647--more than 30 years--traveling back and forth to the Continent. On one of his trips to the Jesuit college at Saint-Omer in Flanders, Whitbread met Titus Oates. Oates presented himself as a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism and as wanting to join the Jesuits. Whitbread rejected his application and told him to leave Saint-Omer. Both men returned to England.

On the Feast of Saint James, Father Whitebread expanded upon the question Jesus asked the Apostle James and John after their mother asked Him to give them special honors in His Kingdom, sitting at His right and left: "Can you drink the chalice I am going to drink? They said to him, "We can." (Matthew 20:22) Whitebread goes on to ask his congregation of Jesuits:

Can you drink the chalice? Can you undergo a hard persecution? Are you contented to be falsely betrayed and injured? . . . Can you suffer the hardships of a jail, the straw bed, the hard diet, the chains and the fetters? Can you endure the rack? . . . Can you patiently receive an unjust sentence of a shameful death?

To each question the answer is "Possumus (We can). Blessed be God."

And they did.

On his return to England as this Jesuit website explains, Titus Oates had

joined forces with Israel Tonge, who harbored suspicions of the Jesuits' plotting against the king. Tonge and Oates invented the story of a plot by the Jesuits to assassinate the king, overthrow the government and re-establish the Catholic religion. They were able to present this accusation to the king in mid-August, 1678, but he did not find it credible. So Oates fabricated more details and presented the revised accusation to the king's privy council on September 27, setting into motion a deadly chain of events.

Then members of the Jesuit order, including Thomas Whitebread, were arrested, put on trial, and eventually found guilty of this treasonous and murderous conspiracy.

So that brings us to Bowden's second memento of these Jesuit martyrs, on page 197, "A Bribe Rejected". As the five Jesuits, John Gavan, William Harcourt, Anthony Turner, John Fenwick, and Whitebread had prepared themselves at Tyburn to suffer the "shameful death" of condemned traitors--with the nooses around their necks--

there came a horseman in full speed from Whitehall, crying, "A pardon! A pardon!" . . . the King granted them their lives . . . on condition of their acknowledging the conspiracy and laying open what they knew thereof. They all thanked His Majesty . . . but they knew of no conspiracy, much less were guilty of any, and could not therefore accept any pardon on these conditions. . . .

If they did, they would be lying.They could not sin to save their lives. In a way they answered the King's implied questions with "Non Possumus"--We cannot.

Bowden uses one of Our Lord's replies to Satan's temptations in the desert from the Gospel of St. Matthew as the verse for this memory of five Blessed English martyrs: "Then Jesus saith to him: Begone, Satan: for it is written, The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and him only shalt thou serve." (Matthew 4:10)

Blessed Thomas Whitbread, pray for us!

Blessed John Gavan, pray for us!

Blessed William Harcourt, pray for us!

Blessed Anthony Turner, pray for us!

Blessed John Fenwick, pray for us!